Northwestern University’s award winning paper, The Daily Northwestern, has recently selected School Newspapers Online (SNO) as their new online publishing platform.
SNO looks forward to helping this prestigious journalism program achieve their online publishing goals and is honored to be selected as The Daily Northwestern’s new publishing platform.

The Daily Northwestern is no stranger to the online publishing world and has been offering online content since 1999. They tried a variety of different publishing platforms including models built on site by enterprising students to professionally designed content management systems (CMS). They selected SNO as their new platform provider because of its flexibility, affordability and ease of use. Chris Widman, production manager for the paper, believes that SNO provided the best “value to cost ratio on the market”.

He said that SNO offers a “good balance between professional design and technical administration for the website while offering flexibility to students to add their own touches and for us to install custom plug-ins when needed.” SNO’s platform saves full time staff from having to constantly worry about and fix the website should a major problem occur.

The WordPress-based platform provides flexibility in changing layouts and fonts, makes it easy to add pictures, videos and other content and is easily customizable to an organization’s unique needs. Widman especially likes the fact that students can add and change plug-ins as desired creating their own custom tweaks. Students enjoy the ease of learning and using a platform based in WordPress. Many are already familiar with format and Northwestern’s experience has shown that it is relatively easy to learn. Since WordPress is utilized across the publishing world, students can pick up skills with broad applications that will be used both on the school paper and in future publishing careers.

One key feature of the SNO FLEX platform that often proves essential to Northwestern is the ability to easily change and add administrators and other users. The approximately 100 students working on the paper each term are often changing and the ability to easily modify the programs users is very important. Widman said, “It is easy for the students to administer the site themselves.”

The Daily Northwestern is one of the top college level publications. Their print version is published Monday- Friday to more than 15,000 readers and their online version receives approximately 300,000 page views each month. This year they are nominated for the Associated College Press Pacemaker award, a coveted honor among college papers, an award Northwestern has successfully claimed six times since 2001.

About School Newspapers Online (SNO)

Founded by a scholastic newspaper adviser, SNO has been providing schools and organizations with affordable, user-friendly online publishing solutions since 2008. Their platform is ideal for those looking to create or enhance their online presence. Each customized website is built on the WordPress publishing platform and features mobile responsive design and a variety of tools enabling layout and font changes, video embedding and more. SNO brings the functionality and design possibilities of major newspaper sites to universities and schools across the nation at an affordable price.